Sport education for future Olympians

We often hear the call for a return to compulsory school sport to combat obesity and encourage kids to get up and moving, now it's being touted as a pathway to boosting our Olympic medal tally.

Assessing Australia's performance in London, Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates says one area the federal government needs to examine is compulsory school sport.

He spoke to AM reporter Lisa Miller.

"Perhaps the area that needs a lot of attention - and if not, funding and government intention in terms of policy - is getting sport back into the school curricula," he said.

"The British are making a big thing of that being one of the legacies they're looking towards, and they've been achieving that, a greater emphasis on sport in the schools.

"We need that because we've got to make sure we have a talent pool.

"We are one-third of the population in Britain, one-quarter of Germany, one-third of France. We've got to have a system that's going to have a lot of kids there. We've got to be looking for the next Cathy Freeman and the next Ian Thorpe."

Movement education

Dr Graham Dodd from the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation along with many of his peers have been calling for better 'movement education' policies long before the London Olympics.

Dr Dodd is less concerned with Australia's Olympic medal tally than he is with the benefits from activity.

"Education ministers at state and federal level have been derelict in my view for decades for not making physical education and movement education - which sport is a part of - a bigger component of a child's education in Australia," he told Angela Catterns on the 666 ABC Canberra Breakfast Show.

"The idea of developing just a sporting nation, we need to be focussing on total healthy development of our people of this nation because we're not a very healthy nation."